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The 'internationally-recognized government of Syria' has run an internationally recognized ethnic cleansing campaign against the country's Sunni population, the

• jessaustin 6y ago
  Haha we have sanctions on Cuba for Pete's sake. Sanctions don't imply anything. They do kill thousands of people a month in Venezuela alone [0], with corresponding numbers in a dozen other nations so good job I guess. There was no "gas attack". Some murderous slaving ISIS criminals took a sledgehammer up on the roof, knocked out some holes, and shoved some empty canisters into them. Then they mixed some bleach with some muriatic acid and left the scene. Later, there was of course some chlorine residue. But simple physics proved that full canisters of poison gas hadn't been "dropped out of helicopters": the roof wouldn't have stopped so many of them. [1] Actual gas bombs of the sort that USA sold to Saddam for use against Iran are carefully constructed devices that can actually be dropped from aircraft and expected to distribute poison gas. Dropping bare storage cylinders only works in the movies. The real conspiracy theory is that the internationally-recognized government of Syria had anything to do with those attacks. They had neither means nor motive. The "moderate rebels" (really ISIS) that USA had been supporting had both. Of course you don't care about details. Even your pose of criticism of Saudi is cynical. You want to sell the Saudis bombs to kill Yemeni children right up until they don't want to buy them anymore, at which time you'll want to start bombing KSA. Mostly you just support status quo USA policy for the last 70 years. That is, we kill lots of brown and black people so that the public can be buffaloed into giving armaments manufacturers obscene amounts of money. The public would prefer to spend that money on literally anything else; you disagree. You'll probably make a show of declaring that you're actually more against war than I am, but your religious devotion to every lie that the war media has ever tossed off shows where your heart is. Pacifists oppose killing innocents, both through sanctions and through the wars for which sanctions are pretexts. The Middle East is broken for the same reason that Latin America is broken and Southeast Asia was broken for a long time: USA broke it. The best thing we can do for them is the best thing we could have done for them in the 1950s: stop interfering with their governments, stop providing armaments to various parties, and stop killing them. [0] https://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/venezuela-sanctions-2019-04.pdf https://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/venezuela-sanctions-... [1] https://thegrayzone.com/2019/05/25/opcw-syria-gas-attack-staged-theodore-postol/ https://thegrayzone.com/2019/05/25/opcw-syria-gas-attack-sta...
  • yyyk 6y ago
    The US alone has sanctions on Cuba, nearly the entire world (except Putin and Iran and China) has sanctions on Assad. It's a bit different, you see? Nobody believes the lies regarding the WMD massacres, we know Assad did these (and so much more). It required rebels with no advanced weapons, much less chemical weapons, to attack themselves over and over, while never ever attacking Assad. The Douma massacre in particular wasn't bleach, it was a different chemical agent[0]. The nature of Assad's attacks is well documented[1]. There's nothing 'pacifist' about shilling for mass murder. It's like those 'pacifists' Orwell attacked during WW2 because they were equating the Allies with the Nazis, that is, being 'objectively pro-fascist'. That's a very cynical position, despite your alleged criticism of Saudi. I bet that as soon as Saudi ignores US and buys weapons from Russia we'll hear a different tune from your likes. [0] https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2020/01/15/the-opcw-douma-leaks-part-1-we-need-to-talk-about-alex/ https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2020/01/15/the-opcw-dou... [1] https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/04/21/the-open-source-hunt-for-syrias-favourite-sarin-bomb/ https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/04/21/the-open-source-h...
    • jessaustin 6y ago
      Haha "bellingcat" that's rich. No one conscious pays attention to that spook show. Grayzone has had their number for a long time. [0] They do have good SEO; it's not surprising that a naive google on these topics pulls their emissions out of the bog. And Eliot Higgins is an inspiration! From unemployed college dropout to widely-cited international aviation and weapons expert, through a personally-developed, diligent regimen of playing video games. [1] The joke is certainly on Theodore Postol: he wasted a fifty-year career studying physics, nuclear technology, and weapons systems at Pentagon, Argonne National Labs, and Stanford, only to be overruled by this pasty neckbeard. It's almost as if the way to get quoted in the war media is to say just what the war pigs want said... [0] https://thegrayzone.com/?s=bellingcat&orderby=relevance&order=DESC https://thegrayzone.com/?s=bellingcat&orderby=relevance&orde... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/01/business/media/open-source-journalism-bellingcat.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/01/business/media/open-sourc...
      • 6y ago